USSF REPARATIONS RESOLUTIONWHEREAS the WSF Charter of Principles commit to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth; WHEREAS the centuries long enforced enslavement of Africans resulted not only in the dispersal of millions of our people throughout the Caribbean, North, Central and South America, but also a systematic and institutionalized second class citizenship in countries comprising the TransAtlantic Slavery Diaspora; WHEREAS the so-called abolishment of the morally illicit trafficking in enslaved Africans was redirected to the prison system as a form of punishment for alleged criminal conduct, including “Black Codes” which criminalized any behaviour of Blacks which threatened the numerous forms of institutionalized racism designed to sustain black inferiority and economic exploitation based on skin color; WHEREAS the historical legacy of the Holocaust of Enslavement, the ideology of “white supremacy, and its economic and cultural effects, continue to the present day, in the form of disproportionate access to capital and other forms of wealth, jobs, education, and a targeted criminalization of Afro-descendants; WHEREAS the lingering effects of “plantation slavery” was and is evident in the recent treatment of Afro-descendants during Hurricane Katrina, who were allowed to die thru government sanctioned denial of access to life-saving emergency services, and treated and called “refugees” in their second homeland; WHEREAS we have been variously referred to as to “the slaves,” Negroes,” “Colored people,” Niggras,” blacks, “Niggers, and “African Americans,” but have now agreed to the term, and self-defined as ,Afro-descendants; WHEREAS slavery in the Americas brought about the cruelest assault imaginable upon a people, who were kidnapped and stolen from their native land, and upon their forced arrival to the Americas were separated from others who spoke their language, “seasoned” and “broken” by violence and degradation, including rape, lynching, beatings, torture and forced breeding, resulting in a self-hatred, internalized racism, devoid of memory of self, and constituting cultural, psychological and inter-generational trauma. WHEREAS International law supports reparations as a bona fide remedy for the destruction of collective human rights of Afro-descendants, providing for restitution, reconciliation, repatriation and reparations; WHEREAS the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 2001 declared the so-called TransAtlantic Slave Trade as a “crime against humanity” and further opened the doors for legal redress for enslavement and colonialism; WHEREAS there has been historical demands or petitions for “just rewards for honest labor” by formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants, from the individual Petition to the Massachusetts State Legislature by Belinda in 1782 to the 1867 bill introduced into the 40th Congress calling for confiscating land from the former Confederate States and redistributing it to the so-called freedmen [also known as the “demand for 40 acres and mule”], THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that as both participants of the USSF and as representatives and supporters of over 300Afro-descendant reparations advocacy organizations, We submit that our collective and just demands for reparations clearly represent a key movement building opportunity and a means for envisioning and creating a new world. A Partial List of Organizations: National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations In America |